If you wish to see it, it includes some handsome visuals including a little film by Stan Brakhage, please go to his site.

Upcoming Events in the UK

On July 3rd there will be screenings of the Michael McClure bio documentary Abstract Alchemist, a film about Gary Snyder and another about Frank O'Hara, all by Colin Still. Michael McClure will introduce the films.

On July 8th, Michael McClure will give a reading in London at the London Review Book Shop, where the film Abstract Alchemist will also be presented.

RECENT BILLBOARD

Abstract Alchemist of Flesh, a fifty-five minute documentary film of Michael McClure, with cameos of Dennis Hopper, Ray Manzarek, Allen Ginsberg. By Optic Nerve Films London, presently being released.

Michael and Ray Manzarek are currently editing their new double CD, Live from San Francisco.

In the summer of 2008 McClure performed and spoke at The Prague International Writers Festival, and at Casa della poesia in Salerno, Italy.

May 2009 he premiered his poem, "Double Moire," with jazz trio by George Brooks at the Jazz School in Berkeley.

He performed his poems with the group BIG MIX at Yoshi's, San Francisco. (Seven minutes of the Yoshi's performance can be seen on this website.)

Spring 2008 he performed his poems with Wayne Wallace's Latin Jazz Band at the De Young Museum, San Francisco.

McClure's poetry headlined the Drums in the Chest Festival at the Los Angeles Theater Works, August 2009.

BIOGRAPHY

"The role model for Jim Morrison," as the Los Angeles Times characterized Michael McClure, has found sources in music from Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis to the composer Terry Riley with whom his poetry performances frequently share a bill.

Recently McClure joined with composer Terry Riley to create a CD titled I Like Your Eyes Liberty. The CD explores spontaneous music and voice (working together) expressing the outrageous and mystical in both artists.

McClure has worked extensively with his old friend Ray Manzarek, the Doors' keyboardist, at festivals and colleges and clubs. They appeared with saxophonist David Sanborn on NBC-TV performing a jazz version of McClure's "Love Lion Blues." Mystic Fire released a 70 minute video of the duo and a compact disk Love Lion followed. McClure and Manzarek's second CD carries on their explorations. Third Mind, a film of Michael and Ray's conversations and performances, was premiered by the Sun Dance Channel.

McClure reads with an actor's command and a singer's timing, his impact "transports audiences to a very different and intriguing place." He has given hundreds of reading in venues as varied as the Fillmore Ballroom, Yale University, Stanford, The National Biodiversity Conference at the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress. His audiences have ranged from an intimate dozen at a tiny Maui bookstore, to tens of thousands at San Francisco's Human Be-in in San Francisco, and to multitudes at Airlift Africa. One of the poet's readings was to, and with, four lions at the San Francisco Zoo — a film of it is is sometimes shown on TV. McClure's world-wide performances include Rome; Paris; Tokyo; Lawrence, Kansas, London, a bull ring in Mexico City, The Whitney Museum, and a steam room in Nairobi for a group of African businessmen.

A reviewer of a recent London reading wrote, "McClure's West Coast delivery was deliberate, cool, spacious..." The Journal-World in Lawrence Kansas offered these observations of McClure at the William Burroughs celebration, "McClure looked cool. Yet he grew warm, wending lyrical words around the air and across the hall, The coolness fell away with his simple elegance in word and presentation... McClure was controlled and read with steady jazz rhythms, a perfect, minimal chart of spoken words."

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